Posted on June 6, 2025
Biden Their Tongues
Media feign ignorance of the obvious
by
Daniel Clark
Ever since
CNN Washington correspondent Jake Tapper began promoting his book, Original
Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run
Again, journalists across the country have been expressing shock over Joe
Biden's diminished cognitive state, and questions of who had really been acting
as president for the past four years.
Even Tapper's co-author, Axios political correspondent Alex Thompson,
admitted that, "We, myself included, missed a lot of this story."
It's easy to see why these legions
of sleuthing truth-tellers were unaware of Biden's loss of his presidential
marbles, the facts being so subtle and scarce.
So Biden had to be prevented from interacting with others for almost the
entirety of the 2020 campaign, hidden away "in the basement" as his opponents
would characterize it. As president, he
seldom spoke to the press, and when he did he would just deliver a statement
and walk away, prompting reporters to holler questions at him in vain. He would
carry cheat sheets to routine White House events, and then hold them up so that
they could be seen giving him instructions like, "YOU take YOUR seat ... YOU
thank participants ... YOU depart."
He would
often lose his train of thought mid-sentence, and use the word "anyway" to
excuse himself from finishing. He didn't
know what to call the Declaration of Independence ("You know, the thing"). He mistook his wife for his sister. He would misread the teleprompter, saying out
loud those parts that were not meant to be spoken. For example, when he was supposed to pause to
allow for an orchestrated "four more years" chant from his audience, he instead
read the words, "Four more years.
Pause." After speaking, he would
sometimes reach out to shake hands with somebody who wasn't there.
Speaking
at a gathering of anti-gun activists in Connecticut, he confused the audience
when he wrapped up his remarks with the non sequitur, "God save the Queen,
man." Three months later in Vietnam, he
concluded a press conference by saying, "I don't know about you, but I'm going
to go to bed."
At a G20
summit in Brazil, he wandered off and consequently did not appear in the
traditional photograph with the other world leaders. When he froze on stage at a fundraiser in Los
Angeles, his former boss, President Obama, took him by the hand and led him
away. His wife Jill would often walk him
around by the hand at diplomatic events, making him appear like a child. When he became involved in an impromptu
discussion with reporters at the White House Easter egg roll, a staffer in a
bunny costume intervened and whisked him away.
On multiple occasions, indentations from his CPAP machine could be seen
in his face during events in the middle of the afternoon, indicating that
somebody had just woken him up, gotten him dressed, and shoved him out in front
of the cameras.
When
special counsel Robert Hur announced that he would not bring charges against
Biden for keeping classified documents in his garage, he attributed his
decision to the president's observable state of deterioration, explaining that,
"at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during
our interview with him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning elderly man with a poor
memory."
That's not much to go on. It's not as if Tapper and his intrepid,
hard-working colleagues were clairvoyant, or anything. If they say they innocently "missed a lot of
this story," rather than being active conspirators in a Democrat cover-up, then
let's give them the benefit of the doubt.
As long as we're assuming that the liberal media simply missed the
warning signs of Biden's unfitness for office, however, they ought to be
willing to conduct an audit of their past reporting for other, equally elusive
facts that they failed to grasp at the time.
For example:
* Maybe
President Biden, or whoever was acting in his stead, really could have taken
certain measures to stem the tide of illegal immigration, without any new
legislation needing to be passed. It
might even prove to be the case that illegal immigration was already
illegal. At any rate, if he really did
want to control our borders but for the intransigence of congressional
Republicans, proposing that "we immediately surge to the border all those
people seeking asylum" was obviously counterproductive.
* It turns
out that "illegal aliens" is not only an accurate term, but a legally proper
one, whereas "undocumented immigrants," which makes their status sound like the
result of a paperwork snafu, is grossly inaccurate and should not be used by
any respectable journalist.
* Perhaps
future criticisms that Donald Trump is paranoid should be tempered by a
recognition that he really was the victim of a deep-state conspiracy to remove
a duly elected president from office, the Steele Dossier really was a hoax, the
Obama Justice Department really did spy on the Trump 2016 campaign, Adam Schiff
really did lie repeatedly, both in TV interviews and in the House chamber, and
Trump really has been the target of frivolous, legally dubious, politically
motivated litigation ever since.
* In
hindsight, angrily demanding that everybody wear masks riddled with pores that
are as much as 2000 times larger than a coronavirus particle might not have
been the best example of "following the science."
* Upon
further review, rampaging hordes of rioting arsonists and looters are not
really so peaceful after all.
* If you
want to get really technical about it, there isn't any hard evidence that your
car has ever caused a hurricane.
* Greta
Thunberg has largely been a creation of the media, and for that, profuse
apologies are due.
* Although
people are often killed "with" guns, not a single person in the history of the
world has ever been killed "by" a gun, and any report that says somebody had
been is bad journalism.
* When
women who have taken abortion drugs die of complications from abortion, blaming
their deaths on people who oppose abortion is irrational, and certainly not
deserving of the Pulitzer Prize that was recently given to ProPublica.
* It turns
out that there are these things called "chromosomes," which tell us not only
that a new human being is created at the instant of fertilization, but also
whether this person is male or female.
This means a person's gender is integral to the creation of that person. It is not "assigned at birth," nor is it
determined by the subjective choice of that same person.
* To the
extent that there is any such thing as a Middle East peace process, the only
party that has ever been willing to accept a two-state solution is Israel.
* Media
retrospectives on the Iraq War should probably get around to mentioning Saddam
Hussein at some point, even at the risk of undermining the prevailing
narrative.
* Our
military won the war in Iraq, and it also did everything it needed to do in
Afghanistan until our leaders gave it away.
Muttering "thankyouforyourservice" is a poor substitute for
acknowledging those accomplishments.
By going
back and un-missing these stories, Tapper and the rest of the seemingly
surprised journalists could go a long way toward establishing the credibility
they've always imagined they had. What
do you say, Jake?
The Shinbone: The Frontier of the Free Press